Houses, food, treatment of the negroes, became at once a study to her,
and her experience in Virginia was invaluable. She had learned there not
to work the slaves too hard in the warm period of the day; and she showed
her interest by having served at her own table the favourite olio the
slaves made of plantains, bananas, yams, calalue, eddoes, cassavi, and
sweet potatoes boiled with salt fish and flavoured with cayenne pepper.
This, with the unripe roasted plantain as bread, was a native relish and
health-giving food.
Ever since the day when she had seen Dyck Calhoun at Spanish Town she had
been disturbed in mind. Dyck had shown a reserve which she felt was not
wholly due to his having been imprisoned for manslaughter. In one way he
looked little older. His physique was as good, or better than when she
first saw him on the hills of Playmore. It was athletic, strenuous,
elastic. Yet there was about it the abandonment of despair--at least
of recklessness. The face was older, the head more powerful, the hair
slightly touched with grey-rather there was one spot in the hair almost
pure white; a strand of winter in the foliage of summer.
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